Metal Gear Solid 5's torture scene will be non-playable

In the wake of the controversy around Grand Theft Auto 5's unskippable and playable torture scene, Hideo Kojima has said the torture scene glimpsed in Metal Gear Solid 5 trailers will be kept to a cutscene.

At the Tokyo Game Show Eurogamer asked Kojima whether such scenes were necessary in video games, and if so whether they should be more sensitively implemented.

"It's something that needs to be done," said Kojima. "As the expressiveness of video games goes up, if you want to go beyond that it's not something you can avoid. Of course not all video games have to do this, and in my case it's not something that I want to go through. If the violence will give new emotions that are important to the game, I want to put it in there, especially with this game where one of the main topics is revenge. I don't want to walk around that."

Grand Theft Auto 5's torture scene, which features the psychotic character Trevor, has come in for criticism for its strong content as well as for forcing players to see through it in order to progress, making them implicit in the act.

"I didn't want to go as far as having playable torture," said Kojima. "The part of Metal Gear Solid 5 that has torture is non-playable."

Metal Gear Solid has featured torture before, although it's been the player that's been the victim in previous games - the original PlayStation game featured a famous scene in which Snake must endure punishment from Revolver Ocelot.

"So far the player's been tortured by Ocelot so much that I'm thinking that I might be the one that introduced torture to games," joked Kojima. "So I'm sorry about that!"